[Lani]

they are propylbaraben, methylparaben and butylparaben.

Their sole purpose is as a preservative and there are many other possible preservatives to use but it is cheap and widely available --so even very expensive products use them. A dermatologist friend says it extremely difficult to find products without them, as he has quite a few patients allergic to them who have great difficulty avoiding them.

This past weekend I spoke to someone with a booth at ASCO who makes UDDER CREAM (I believe that is what it was called) and he was aware of the dilemma but had not yet taken the step to take it out of his product or make two lines, one with and one without. I encouraged him to do so.

I encouraged him to have one line in place in case the scientific literature does incontrovertably implicate the parabens (hasn't happened yet), so he wouldn't be stuck in the same situation as all those manufacturers of plastic bottles.

Crabtree and Evelyn have one natural line without parabens and seem to be aware of the concern.

Unfortunately, despite providing much money to breast cancer research (in fact perhaps even to this website) Avon continues to put parabens into its products.

If parabens did something which no other product did, I could see it. But since the concern is there, providing a choice of products (those with and those without) seems reasonable.